A group of Palestinian activists at Brown University protested a lecture hosted by the school’s Hillel House because it allegedly “defended and even advocated for the Israeli state’s policies of occupation and racial apartheid.”

The speaker, however, was set to be Janet Mock, an African-American trans woman and LGBT activist from Hawaii who planned on delivering a lecture entitled, “Redefining Realness” as part of a year-long lecture series on LGBT rights sponsored by a Jewish group known as “Moral Values.”

The only problem, according to students who protested the event, was that a Jewish organization dared to host a lecture on equality when it is affiliated with a country that supports “colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of native Palestinians.”

“Hillel’s Moral Voices campaign has chosen the topic of LGBTQ rights this year,” students wrote in their petition of the event. “This hides the fact that for decades, the state of Israel and Israeli advocacy organizations (like Hillel) have been engaging in pinkwashing, a strategy that tries to improve Israel’s image and rebrand it as a liberal, modern, and ‘hip’ country.”

Instead, Brown students encouraged Mock to speak anywhere else on campus so long as it was not the Hillel House.

“We are not asking for students to boycott the event, but simply do not want Janet Mock’s invitation to Brown to be part of Hillel’s (and Israel’s) pinkwashing campaign. We therefore ask Janet Mock to accept Brown students’ sponsorship instead of Hillel’s,” protesters wrote in their petition.